Kaidan's Mnemonic
by Juanxer
Summary: Commander Shepard is a hard to please guy. If you want to keep up, you have to level up. Not so easy for Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, serving on an unproven experimental ship, with her slightly nutty crew, while harassed by this Williams woman who, truth be told, is fun to have around.
1. Flan Service

Disclaimer: Mass Effect and its characters belong to BioWare & EA Games.  
Reviews are more than welcome. Author's notes at the end of this chapter.

* * *

Four days ago…

…Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams did her best effort at berating herself. She was playing with fire. Again. And what was new, really?

Well, something was. Escalation.

She had been humming some catchy Citadel Top Forty pop crap while raiding the galley for provisions. Looking forward to a long day of tinkering with her new shiny toys, she crossed paths with Commander Shepard, on his way to his quarters. datapad in hand bursting with mindnumbing Alliance Navy paperwork, a grim dead-man-walking expression on his face, the poor guy.

It was a well-oiled routine: salutes gave way to small talk, which grew into bolder talk, which led to subtle dare talk, which quickly slid into open flirtation, then a close call, a screeching halt, and a sheepish silence. And a salute and good-bye, so brimming with understated warmth that they had very nearly drown in it.

She wouldn't have minded some mouth to mouth resuscitation.

_Yeah, of course you wouldn't._

Her self-deprecating sneer gave way to a questing half-frown, which eventually relaxed into a faraway expression. Leaning on the mess table, elbow resting on her crossed arm, fingers stroking her chin, her mind a blur, the stirrings of a smile growing on her lips, she stood a whole seven seconds looking at nothing at all. Then, suddenly scrunching her face in self-disgust, she hit herself in the head with finality. _God, Ash! What are you, sixteen?_

Bad enough that her practiced teasing, just your basic Marine-grade 'let's talk goats and your sex life' oneupmanship game, inevitably skyrocketed from unusually mild nudge-nudge wink-winking to shameless open flirting whenever Shepard was involved. It could be argued that it was just her self-defense mechanism—and the best defense was a good offense, as far as she was concerned—going into overdrive against the commander's charms. She had never known a superior officer that didn't reveal himself a superior asshole in less than five minutes tops, so this brilliant guy—this brilliant crew—was utterly unknown territory for her. Ashley felt like a Marine Cinderella at the palace ball, her usually reliable instincts ever a bit off-target.

So understandable. So justifiable. So far kinda so good.

Now, her reverie? Another thing, entirely. Here be city-stomping nukebreathing dragons. She never, ever daydreamed about the hunkies around, above or below her rank. Never. Too girlish, too idiotically unprofessional and, ultimately, too un-Williamish.

So, was she cultivating a… a—_say it, dammit!_—a fucking honest to God _crush_ on Shepard? Seriously?

And, even worse, was it mutual?

Ashley was smart: she saw what this could lead her into, or rather out of, away from. She had fought all her life for this opportunity to serve in space, and she had won it through random chance and a catastrophe of blood and flame, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then again by being ready and able, alive and quicking, last woman standing on the bones of her dead comrades and the civilians they failed to protect. There was an implicit debt there, so a sacred duty. Also a vital mission, a heavy responsability and an exceptional man bearing it on his shoulders. With so much at stake—everything, she feared—she couldn't allow herself to compromise it all for trivial self-gratification.

She had to keep it simple, for their sakes_. So behave already! Don't you dare ruin this!_

Not that she was the only guilty party. For someone so En-Sevenly badass, that man could be so damned puppy-eyed at times… The way he sought their opinions and feelings about the mission, tried to get to know them better, Ash guessed Shepard felt far more out of his depth than he would ever care to admit. As far as she understood it, the commander was meant to become both the ship's executive officer—under Captain Anderson's tutelage—and the Marine fire team leader whenever Anderson would care to defer that role to him. In hardly a couple of days Shepard had seen his world turned upside down: inducted into Spectredom, assaulted by alien visions of doom, given the keys of the Normandy, put in charge of an impossible task with hardly any resources but this experimental ship, her crew and a disparate bunch of untrustworthy aliens; and, adding insult to injury, snowed under with utterly irrelevant PR-friendly jobs. So, weeks had passed by, the Normandy's men and women and their leader learning the true implications of this mission, Shepard starting to feel the pressure.

It showed: insomnia, or rather the fear he had all but confessed to her of going through the Prothean genocide every night, that visceral reenacting with him playing not a witness but a victim; mood swings, no longer that subtle; a certain decline in his happy-go-lucky-meter; and, well, a certain increase in his… hardassiness? Ash couldn't fail to see how overly serious the commander became when dealing with shipwide and higher-level decisions, and she sympathized: the guy's real forte was SpecOps soloing or microteaming, while she had far more nominal experience leading larger teams. Then again, there was something to be said about his charisma and ability to impromptu-lead entire masses of troops and civilians alike, as the Skyllian Blitz proved.

This tour was supposed to provide him with a smooth transition to the bigger leagues. Instead, he had got thrown into this sharkfest of a swim-or-sink topsy-turvy nutty version: no net, no training wheels, no real backup, no father figure, no guidance. Shepard was having to grow a bit too stupidly fast, and he resented it, rebeled against it. There was something a little desperate in the way he tried to keep his inner grunt afloat and alive, maintaining this level of informality and closeness in his relationship with the crew. It was smart of him, using them as a sounding board, even simply as a means to relieve all that stress, the way he consulted with Joker, Pressly and Alenko. With her. It was quite sweet, too.

She smiled, replaying in her head his last nocturnal visit to her post downbelow, this meeting of sleep-deprived, dangerously caffeinated minds, crossing confidences and really, _really _bad jokes. She caught herself four seconds later—progress?—and despaired. _I'm worse than Abby: at least she half-knows her thing is a fetish. This? This calls for a Williams Intervention Brigade's full one-eighty reprioritizing._

Yeah, well: no comm relay slot until tomorrow, and what was she going to tell her sisters and the Alliance comms censors that wouldn't put her even deeper in hot water, really?

Mmm…

Better to concentrate on her inmediate tasks. Happy tasks: Last night, brand new weapons license in hand, she and Emerson from Requisitions had hooked up to a comm buoy and downloaded the fabbing templates for a few samples of Rosenkov Materials' range of firearms. Having validated their fabricator and omni-gel provisions, and gone through the usual config settings hiccups, they had left the fabby doing its cooking. Today she was to check the resulting articles' finishing, solve some integration issues she had discussed previously with Emerson and Alenko, and set up the portable test range for the team players and herself to see what the Rosenkovs were about. She hoped the forty eight hours demo period would suffice to get a feel for them, although she suspected Shepard would use some of the pending ops to do a field test.

So, in a word: fun! Laborious work, nevertheless, so there she was, abusing the mess' Autochef rations dispenser, amassing enough fuel to survive the day. Humming again without realizing, she punched the thing's energy bars menu—she liked to put a few light stim snacks among the plain protein ones, a welcome kick in days like this—and saw the old 'I'm feeling lucky!' button trailing the list of available types and flavors.

She usually ignored it, knowing better than that—she had heard a few rather hyperbolic stories… This time, however…

_Do you feel lucky, punk?_

She smiled at herself. _Actually_…

And so she sealed Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko's fate, securing his descent into biotic hell.

* * *

**Flan Service**

Kaidan stood on his self-assigned circle—the smiley chalked on the deck, cartoon-simple mouth and eyes once again redrawn by some misterious hand—naked from the waist up, his modded emergency medical vest now tied to his belt, weighting it down. A flat bundle of cables snaked up his skin marker-graffitied and sensor pads-studded spine until meeting the brain-mapper headband, half-occluded by the cap he wore backwards to guide the wires out of his neck's nape. Hands on his hips, eyes unfocused, he was considering his next move. A dozen meters beyond, a crate rested on the central loading track, scintillating in glowing blue-black refraction, washing the storage deck in subtle underwater-like light.

Two days at it, and he hadn't been able to produce a biotic vertical lift yet.

He was at a loss at how to further proceed. A direct force approach was out of the question: practical for small masses and short distances, as an effective battlefield weapon it required Krogan-like levels of Eezo node density, an amp to match and a nervous system able to handle it without frying. His only options were static and dynamic patterning. The former was the easiest one to apply. That is, easy once you learned which combination of nodes, charge strengths and sequencing produced the desired result, of course.

He had yet to find it.

The latter involved simpler patterns projected in a fast alternating fashion. He hoped he wouldn't need to follow that route: it required a fairly high degree of atention and control, and was quite tiring if done too repeatedly in a single session. Not too useful in combat.

A flicker of flashlight reflecting on the bay's surfaces caught his attention. An ancient-style photochemical camera click he recognized from the soundset of his own omni-tool's Camera VI broke through the pervasive hum of the ship systems. There was an "ooops!"—a male one, this time—followed by an obvious and quite unsuccessful attempt at walking away unnoticed: the guy's boots squeaked with abandon; the slower and lighter he tried to move, the more obtrusive it became. A few derisive snorts and irate though defensive whispers showed there was more than a single peeping Tom on deck.

_Well, so there's that_… Kaidan drooped his head and shoulders, and smiled, quietly, tiredly. He wouldn't deign to turn and see who the guilty party were—familiar with the deck's acoustics, he knew they were doing their furtive exit through the corridor to Engineering next to Requisitions. That narrowed things down considerably. He couldn't help noticing Garrus' amusement, though: The Turian, perched on a partially open-paneled Mako, pointed a talon at the reprobates and chortled a little basso laugh that Kaidan answered in kind, shaking his head at the ridiculousness of it all. Then, a Krogan grunt behind him: Wrex doing his 'bah, stupid noisy humans' oh-so-uninterested act. Which didn't fool anyone, but… Garrus shrugged, and he nodded, agreeing.

The Dark Energy basefield enveloping the crate decayed and died. Rather than replenish it, Kaidan took stock of himself.

He needed a break after nearly an hour and a half experimenting with his biotics: he could feel the first stirrings of a plain ordinary headache, and a mild sugar low—he really ought to have packed more provisions, and didn't look forward to parading through Deck Two in such fashion, validating Chakwas' tongue-in-cheek accusations and making an even bigger fool of himself. Out of habit, his fingers flew to his forehead, eager to knead the tension off, meeting the SQUID band instead. Careful not to disturb it, his hand backtracked. Sighing, he attended the knot creasing his nose bridge, thumb and index finger rubbing it out, then massaging his itchy eyes.

Kaidan left the circle of chalk, absurdly careful to not smudge off the happy mouth and eyes with his boots, and leant against the crate holding the assortment of gadgets he and Chakwas had improvised for the occasion, resting his left arm on his hip and bringing his omni-tool to life. Forcing the limits of its little imager, he maxed the holo, sorting through thirty recordings of his attempts. There had been a few that had shown hints of off-axis ME vectoring, and he wanted to check on the commonalities.

The elevator whirred and clunked and opened its heavy door, attracting his attention to the new crewmates deposited on the deck: Chief Williams was among them, carrying a duffel and a small plastic basket, nodding to him in salute on her way to Requisitions—a hint of a frown coloring her smile, surely wondering what his guise was about this time, what with yesterday's spectacle. He corresponded her, but was quickly distracted by the crew's discretely oblique looks, pokerface fails, supressed giggles, and was that a bit of overt leering? Unbuckling his omni-tool and leaving it active on top of the crate, he crossed his arms and furrowed his eyebrows a little bit, in sort of a serenely defiant 'what?'. Dammit if the youngest in the group weren't acting like teenage schoolgirls. Well, dammit if he wasn't blatantly strutting his stuff around, either, to be fair. If all that succeeding in his task took was showing a bit of skin, so be it.

_Yeah, well, careful with that. Remember that couple of weeks in Copernicus' drydock? Talk about playing with fire._ That brought a bit of a painful smile to his eyes.

Williams had just stopped chatting with the chief requisitions officer—some signs of frustration in her attitude, surely concerning those fabbing slowdowns Emerson told him about—and was turning to face her way to her station. She did a mighty double take on his posturing, on their clowning around, and started laughing in near complete silence, head and shoulders shaking, her lips and eyes so full of delightful mirth that Kaidan couldn't help but surrender a big grin and shake his head in disbelief at his demonstration of who knew what. Big bad biotic boy Alenko?

She crossed the distance rapidly, detouring to his little makeshift lab and dropping the basket on his lap.

"You… Are… Shameless, LT!" she said, turning, magic-wanding a twirly index finger at him while bustling backwards toward the locker row.

_And you are_…_ uh_…_ unapologetically happy? _Either the Rosenkovs that Emerson was cooking for her in that fabricator of his were beyond astoundingly brilliant, or she'd had her daily tête-à-tête with the commander already. He knew the signs, he could tell the tale. _Once upon a time there was this ship, there was this amazing woman, this fearless leader, this sparkle in their eyes_…He fervently hoped that she—that _they_ would be able to handle it, or it would be his duty to boot her off the Normandy, the idea of which he hated to contemplate.

Putting the basket next to his omni-tool, Kaidan took a look inside: a bunch of snacks and energy bars, a couple of thermos full of hot coffee… Flan! There was flan! Grabbing one, snapping the plastic teaspoon off and unsealing the tin cup, he sniffed it. Felt genuinely fake enough, for Citadel-originated supplies, so he tried it. Its passable flavor brought memories back, of the genuine article, of its appareances at home, of family. When Williams came back, he was about to finish it, despite his intention to go slow and really enjoy it, already eyeing a second one.

"A flan person, huh?"

"Yeah. I didn't know we carried these. I missed them… well, the homemade sort, that is."

"Your mom's?"

"More like mine, my brother's or my sister's. It's a family vice. Have you tried it? The caramel," and he waved the nearly already gone exhibit at her, "is suprisingly well done." He got a last spoonful and, feeling a bit naughty, made a little show of dipping a finger into the cup and scooping up the remains into his mouth, childlike. She shook her head, smiling at the act with pretend disapproval. Then her eyes shone with the hint of an idea, which raised his internal alarms.

Too late: Williams activated her omni-tool and landed a burst of flash exposures on him. Blinded by the laserscan, he tried to stop her, "Widdiamphs—", only managing to splutter a cloud of flan particles.

He threw his arms up in protest. "Williams, what the—!

"Don't fret. It's for a good cause, LT," she said, satisfied. Her left arm glowed a virtual roll of holos, which she deftly navigated with her agile fingers, highlighting a few here and there.

"Hunh?"

"My sis, Abby," she explained, concentrated on her task. "We are trying to broaden her horizons, get her back to the twenty-second century, squeeze-wise."

_Uh-oh. _"And my pics help her there… how?"

"It shows her there's life beyond the languid ideals of yesteryear. Don't worry, LT, you won't be alone: she's nearly got the fire team's full set already. By the way, I thought Momo would steal the show, but it's a tie between Fredo and Stearn. You sort of had taken the back seat all this time…" She reviewed her final selection of thumbnails, seemingly doubtful.

"Oh…" Well, he could always count on her to bring him down, couldn't he? Suddenly, he felt rather silly and this bit vulnerable. "And that's… because…", he dared ask.

"…Of my deep respect for you, LT?" she said, jovially businesslike.

_Yeah, of course_. He executed a perfect eyebrow raise. She frowned, her smile adquiring a patient martyr-like tinge.

"And because, thank God, you are yet to do our little Semper Teen guys' oh-so-innocent-walk-in-front-of-the-camera routine during my family calls," she added, and promptly did a fairly unreasonable impression of the thing, all faux masculine sing-song voice and posh armwaving: "'Oh, hi, Chief, is this your sister? hello, Miss Williams, ma'am, how do you do? I'm Private Hunk McStudmuffin, so glad to finally get to know you. You see, your tyranical tomboy from hell of a sister—hee-heehee-heee! It's a joke, we all love her, reaaaally—has told us sooo much about you. Please, you can call me Hunk. Oh, look, I so without really meaning it pulled my gut in, hardened my washboard abs and contracted my pecs and arms, how fortuitous. Ah, thank you for your kiiiind words, although beauty is from within, wouldn't you agree? Tee-hee!'"

Kaidan tried his best to stay poker-faced at her pantomime. He guessed his highly convulsive poker-faced snort wasn't too credible.

"An easy bunch of freakin' peacocks, that lot," she sneered.

That _was_ familiar. Grinning, he mocked her, smugly putting his hands on his hips, "You've been talking to Chakwas, haven't you?"

She eyed him, unreadable—which began to worry him—then suddenly flash-lasered him again with a quick swipe of her 'tool…

_Augh!_ "Williams, dammit!"

…And she checked the results. "A-ha! That's better. Now, with _this_ one, and this one, things get interesting!"

_Nonononono, I don't want interesting, interesting is bad!_ Flattering, of course, yeah, but bad. "Williams—Ash, please…!"

"Thou dost protest too much, LT," she said, patiently, eyes still on her prize.

"Well, I protest, nonetheless! I'm not—"

She lifted her palm, stopping him in his tracks.

"Sir, let's be completely clear here. Are you seriously saying you don't want my nubile retrofencing corset-punk of a sister to take advantage of your pic to dream humid dreams of bodice-ripping… rippingness?"

_Retro-what?_ And truth be told, that was quite an image, straight out of Stearn's collection of—_Uh, what's she doing with her fingers? Three? Three what?_—_Two_—_Oh, no, you don't_—_!_ "Wait!"

"Bzzz! Time is up," she said, triumphant, "Aaand that's a wrap for Operation Back to the Future with You, Abigail Williams' Stage Four. I knew you wouldn't let me down, you dog, Sir!" The chief gestured a couple commands, switched her omni-tool off and crossed her arms. "That said, you ever touch my sister, I kill you dead," she pointed out the smallprint clause.

He was two steps from pulling rank on her and stopping that nonsense. Out of self-preservation. _Stage Four what?_

"Williams. I don't know your sister. I don't get half of what you are talking about, and the other half I don't even want to. I don't do candids. Not for the Alliance's beefcake calendars, not for the Fleet's NetChan, not for the… the… the 'Let's Save the Dolphins Naked' Fornax Annual, so certainly I don't do it for… ah… softcore commissions?"

He felt himself slightly starting to lose it.

"Yeah, I understand, Sir…"

_She does, she does thank God, Buddha, the dancing chick with lots of arms, the Asari Goddess, the spirit of Palaven and the whole pantheon of_—

"…I get it completely: just too bland for you, too tame…"

Somewhere there had to exist a God of Lieutenants he hadn't sacrificed enough virgin—or slightly used—vestals to, and this woman was his revenge made flesh.

_Aaaand now it's when I strangle her and get carted away to the biotic funny farm. Costly? Certainly. Worth it? Completely!_

But she relented, and changed tone. "LT, is just a picture. For my sister. For _fun_. And it's not like half the crew haven't got you holo'd already. Look, if you really don't want to…"

He opened his mouth, ready to firmly though not ungently state his final decision. But…

_Ah, well._

"You've got a point, chief." She was right, and at least she was giving him the courtesy of asking—'courtesy' was probably too kind a way to describe her siege technique, but in the end it was what it amounted to. Deflated, he unfocused his eyes and let them drift.

"Are we okay with this, then, Sir?"

"Yeah, chief, we're okay." He was, actually._ God, she's a natural born brainwasher. We are so wasting her talents._

"I came on a bit too strong, didn't I?"

"Nah, perish the thought." And she was so cute, playing the concerned card.

She clapped his shoulder. "Thank you, LT. Really!". He was grateful for the lack of irony in her words, a rare show of compassion for the defeated, too aware of her being more of a dancing-in-your-grave kind of woman.

Kaidan rubbed his neck, absently. He should get back to work: it had been difficult enough making room in his schedule for these experiments to waste any more time in idle conver—

"They really asked you, didn't they?"

"Ah… sorry?"

"The beefcake calendar."

_I'm in hell, I really am_. There was no release, no escape. _Don't lie to her. You'll make it worse, she'll know, somehow. Just Zen through it._

"Once. They didn't know I was… 'that L2-class biotic'," he air-quoted. "My CO quickly put an end to that. All quite silly, really. I was a corporal, part of a tech-oriented fire team, learning the ropes in the Traverse. It happened during a conversion course test at Pinnacle Station: some Alliance PR suits were monkeying around, looking for fresh good-looking meat, and fell on us like vultures."

A little wave of nostalgia washed upon him, reflecting on his eyes. Selective memory, of course, but he missed those times. "I was still pretty buff back then, I guess. Nowadays…" He extended an arm and gyrated his hand and elbow, watching the interplay of the muscles involved, then flexing it for an instant, curious. His biotic metabolism was mostly a hindrance, as far as he was concerned, but he could appreciate the way it ate any surplus fat from his skin. "Ship life wastes your body, despite the standard Med package and the prescribed exercise regime and diet," he mused. Shrugging it off, he went on: "Anyway, that was the only time—What…?"

Williams eyes had strayed to her left a moment ago, going open wide, then squinty. Now they were fixed on his, a perilous smile twitching in her mouth.

"Do that again."

"What—?"_ Oh! Heh, really!_ "Mmm-nah, I don't think so," he answered, smirking, feeling the rare pleasure of being able to deny her something.

"Aww, c'mon, LT, don't be an ass!"

She very nearly stomped on the deck while saying it, laughing, a mix of fun and frustration that Kaidan found pretty adorable. He would let slide that last remark of hers just to enjoy her show and his opportunity for a well-placed retort or two. "A month ago you were chastising me at Chora's, and now you are asking for private sessions. Serious turnaround, Williams."

"Ha! As if. Look—I mean, don't, don't look: the Dravens and Pakti are practically drooling at—NO, DON'T LOOK BACK, what are you, retarded?"

_Oookay, Ash, that went a bit too far_. He impressed some danger in his gaze. Williams realized her misstep.

"…Metaphorically speaking? …Or something? Ah… lieutenant, Sir?"

Kaidan nodded, satisfied—up to a point—and tried a not-too-obvious peek behind his back. As he feared, the constantly renewed bunch of six or so men and women at Emerson's were at their silliest, a quite familiar spectacle he had hoped wouldn't repeat itself ever. But then, this time it was his fault entirely. Well, his and Joker's ScuttleBot, if he knew his 'with-friends-like-these': the way the crew was rotating their visits down there, at such precise intervals, it smacked of a certain ScuttleSched 'microliberties' organizer program he remembered all too well. Because, God help him, he had lent a hand with devising it, he was that naive Jeff Moreau-wise back then.

Ogling the staff lieutenant? 'There's a VI for that'.

He pressed his lips together and closed his eyes, remembering those last three months before shakedown day, reliving the Normandy's convoluted road to operational readiness: this too-close-knitting-for-comfort of the ship's personnel, isolated and stressed and going _slightly mad_ living in this series of high security drydocks and stations, surrounded by colorful Turians, overzealous guards, xenophobic and xenophyllic and mostly equally nuts support staff. _It's 'the love boat' all over again._

The best and brightest. _And antsiest, and just this little bit unhinged_. 'You don't screw with this crew', Anderson dixit. The first time, he thought that one was the usual macho stance one-liner. Later, he discovered it was both an order and a warning.

Sensing that promise of a headache circle him, showing him teeth, he brought his finger to his brows, intent on rubbing it away. "My hair is turning gray. I can feel it."

"Some chicks dig that," and she frowned. "'The picture of Kaidan Gray'. Don't worry, Sir: you'll stay forever young while that holo bit-rots in the Williams' vault of arcane matriarchal knowledge, poetry, corseting and sundry girly stuff."

"A good tradeoff, I guess," he said, unconvinced.

Now that he thought about it… "Has the commander done it?"

Williams smirked. "What, posing half-naked in a beefcake—?"

That made him chuckle. "Yours is pretty much a one-track mind, isn't it? No. That one we would know, 'the hero of the Skyllian Blitz shows it all'. No: your tee-hee thing?"

"Ah. No—Yeah… Kinda, backwards, once." She seemed a little sheepish there. Interesting.

"'Backwards'?"

"My other sister the magnificent tee-heerista herself."

"I see. 'Oops'?"

"'Oops' indeed."

"And…?"

Williams smiled at the memory. "He laughed it off. Anyway, he's too roguish for Lynn and Sarah. Abby digs roguish, though… Well, as long as it is languid roguish. Trying to wean her off that."

"Mmm-hmm." _And so you dig him, too_. He wouldn't ever ask her, openly.

"Yeah…" she dropped, a bit absently, answering at nothing in particular.

_Ha! So we biotics really are telepaths, after all. Handy._

And that was it, this whole train of thought, thoroughly well assaulted, derrailed, pillaged, the passengers' bodies hanging from the burning wagons' windows, covered in arrows.

Both of them leaning on the crates, Kaidan was first to rummage again in Williams' foods basket, she doing likewise upon noticing him, choosing a vanilla-flavored protein bar while he went for a coconut one—the flan was mightily tempting, but he'd rather space those small pleasures. Absently, they watched CRO Emerson go through his usual assess-negociate-purchase-resell routine, that worker bee of a man keeping an eye on his fabbing setup, and attending the suspiciously fluid rate of visits from the rest of the crew. With surprise, they discovered themselves doing their munching in perfect unison. He frowned, amused. She snorted, and waited for his next chomp to re-sync.

Finally, Kaidan fastened his omni-tool back to his wrist and minimized its projection down to a thumbnails gallery. Williams watched, recognizing some elements from yesterday's session.

"So, how's things? And why are you doing the sexy, anyway?"

"These sensor patchs," and he clapped his back, "all of a sudden won't transmit when covered with my undersuit, or with anything else, like my t-shirts or my tank top, which doesn't make any sense, really. I think the slightest pressure shortcircuits their antennas or something, but I don't have that much time to debug the design and refab them, hence the burlesque."

She plucked one of his spares from a box and twirled the flat hexagonal pad with her fingers, studying the thing with vague interest.

"Well. For the girls, and a few of the guys, it's been a definite improvement on Hyper Ranger Black," she pointed out.

Kaidan half-grimaced at that. "Heh! Don't remind me. I can't believe I didn't see that one coming, I was such a fan when I was a kid."

Actually, it had been a liitle bit of great fun, getting to reminisce childhood memories of fandom and geekiness. With Garrus, of all people.

"So, any progress?"

"No, not really. Just hints of possible approaches." His fingers danced over his omni-tool's display, selecting and grouping the most promising samples. "If I don't get anything remotely solid between today and tomorrow, I'll simply have to drop it for now and concentrate on getting stronger in my current forms," and he furrowed his brow, lowering his voice, nearly talking to himself. "Which isn't that easier, either, but at least I know how to go at it."

She tilted her head, frowning a little, herself. "I didn't figure all this could be so difficult."

"Yeah, well, I've been too optimistic, thinking I could build upon what I can do already. It doesn't seem to work that way. It ought to, on paper: I mean, I have enough control over my Eezo nodes to recreate my basic moves from scratch and introduce small variations." He demonstrated, extending his arms, doing small gestures—'minimonics'—that translated into distinctly different kinds of halos rippling alongside them, liquid-like light and darkness distorting his 'tool's holos. "I'd hoped that by just changing the strength, vectoring or the timing of one or two of the node clusters at most, I'd be able to alter my basefield-imprinter interference pattern to produce a Mass Effect field perpendicular to the grav-plane, and… ah… that your eyes wouldn't glaze over listening to my buzzword-rich talk?"

She wasn't one to fear admiting being guilty. "Sorry, LT: blue glowy pretty lights, I'm an easily distracted cat. But go on, please: I love it when you geeks talk dirty."

"Oh, do you, really?"

"Yeah. It's the subtext, all those naughty 'perpendicular' double entendres…"

Kaidan snorted at that. "Damn, I'm boring you silly, ain't I?"

She clapped on his shoulder, sisterly.

"Nah, not really. I _do _follow you, believe it or not: you don't get to be a Gunny without understanding a few of the fundamentals… although your biotics are rather too into deep freaky territory, no offense, Sir."

"None taken, chief." Eyes back on the row of amber light panes floating over his left forearm, he expanded the selected items while listening to her.

"One question: what did you mean by 'recreating your basic moves'? When you explained them yesterday I kind of understood that's how you build your Mass Effects, piece by piece—I mean, selecting specific node combos—"

He pursed his lips. One excellent question, that one was: perspicacious, and a potential can-of-worms opener. So, evasive maneuvers. "Hey, 'node combos'! We'll make a technobabbler out of you yet, chief."

"Over _your_ dead bodies, LT. None of that techno-posh geektalk for me, I plan on keeping on being a foul-mouthed ignorant—uh, Stearn here already? Damn! As it is, he's a bit early."

He saw their service chief, Lance Stearn, stride out of the elevator carrying his tool bag. The tall, whitish-blonde crewcut, rugged-looking veteran scanned the Storage Deck, searching for Williams at her weapons maintenance station, then among Emerson's strangely acting small circle of petitioners. Kaidan smiled to himself when Stearn did that mildly amused eyebrow raise of his upon finding them aside: he could imagine the man making the connection between his lieutenant's guise and the CRO's crowd's antics. He had been aboard during Copernicus, too, after all.

Lance wouldn't comment any further: he liked to flaunt this veneer of British impassiveness he was so fond of. A true scholar, a real badass, it was an interesting affectation. He approached them.

"Lieutenant, Sir. Ma'am." They saluted. Williams gave him the news.

"I'm afraid the fabby is still cooking the goods, chief. It ought to finish any minute now."

"Hmm. Any explanation why?"

"A misconfiguration in the license card. The samples' microframe modules are particularly finicky, and the license's fab-controller goes far over the top with the rez and the antialias, which brings the machine's STM lithographer head into play, and the whole thing nearly to a halt." Williams, disdainful, made a half-shrug. "When we became aware of that, Emerson had engaged the fabricator already, so… Once this first batch is done, he'll raise the tolerances. Luckily, we were still in comm buoy range when we discovered the slowdown and could check the forums, so we managed to cancel and divert all the off-frame base mods to my station's mini-fab. Just a bit of a—" She noticed Kaidan looking at her with an intense smirk. "What?"

"That doesn't bode that well for the new toys, wouldn't you say?" Stearn noted.

"Their point-oh releases have a good solid rep. It's the updates one has to take with a grain of salt, you know, let a few early adopters explode for the cause. Don't worry, we made sure there won't be any nasties: these versions have had half a year in the field—what? What! Aw, LT, stop it!"

"'Techno-posh geek-talk', hunh?" Kaidan couldn't believe she was that capable of infodumping on them. _I'm so going to ask her to marry me, and we will have lots of little geekie babies, and they'll inherit the earth, and Mars too, why not._

Why not? Well, because if looks could kill, the possibility that he wouldn't survive the next ten seconds was pretty stratospheric. Still, he couldn't help the smugness.

"Sir?" Stearn eyes shined too, well-humored. His was an entirely rhetorical question, he clearly guessed what that was about.

"She's a closeted boomstick nnnerrrrd!"

"My, is she, really?" Stearn feigned horror. Williams feigned Jack the Ripper.

"She won't admit it, but she can spit buzzwords like a champ."

She seemed to have had enough, and counterattacked, just as he hoped.

"Oh, really! Excuse me, Sir?" Sassy, she lifted a hand. "Saturday morning cartoon-nerd?" Then lifted the other one. "Weapon maintenance and fabbing techniques-nerd? There's a difference."

"Yyyep, of course," Kaidan condescended.

"Also, I've had to eat my share of Requisitions duty every time a superior asshole happened to sniff my lineage and think how much fun being an utterly unimaginative bastard could be, so I got to learn the lingo, and you two better be grateful for that."

"So we are, Ma'am", curtsied Stearn.

"You are so our hero, chief," Kaidan added, nodding humbly. Williams glared an intensely suspectful look at him.

"Humph! Okay," satisfied, she practically threw the food basket at Stearn, who grabbed it without a hitch. "Pick your poison, Lance. Those are for Fredo and Momo, too. You've seen them?"

The man started sorting through the goods. "Boudiaf is at the CIC with the Intel team, doing his tech sorcery on that last batch of Saren-related data traffic, and Fredricks is meant to do a few rounds with the commander. He said he'd taught him a few tricks he played during the Blitz." He stopped and considered. "Mmm, If the articles are that late, perhaps I could take part in the fun, too."

Williams was all too quick to agree.

"You do that, Lance. I can take care of most everything here, anyway"

"Thank you, Ma'am."

And Kaidan felt a weight lift from his shoulders. _Shepard made good of his word!_ He noticed Williams' brief hopeful smile at him, knowing she felt particularly embarrassed by how her arrival had meant her takeover of Stearn's authority, plus the commander's disregarding of the Normandy's Marine team in favor of his ad hoc human/alien mix'n'matches.

So that last conversation with him was fruitful, after all: Shepard would throw a few bones to his men every now and then.

Then he noticed Stearn still toying with the foodstuff, undecided, or perhaps simply not that hungry.

"There's flan too, chief. It's pretty… good?" suggested Kaidan, his words decaying upon seeing Stearn's jovial expression dissolve into… well… "'Pretty good' being Stearnese for 'I killed your puppy dog', surely?"

"Ah… thanks but no, thanks, Sir. Flan and I have… history."

_Um, what?_

Kaidan and Williams stared dumbfounded at Stearn, then at each other. The man kept on rummaging through the food, clearly unenthusiastic. Silence stretched until Williams couldn't bear it anymore.

"Oh, for the love of—Stearn. History lesson. STAT!"

He shrugged, eyes still on the stuff. "It's not that important, and I rather don't air it around."

"Ah-ah, no way, you can't leave us hanging like that after dropping that bomb on us."

He was oh-so-slightly smiling, the bastard. Kaidan couldn't wait to see Williams chew him alive. _Stop the NetChan, ScuttleBot News at ten: chief eats chief._

"Sorry, Ma'am, it's all part of my sordid past."

That made her laugh. "C'mon, Lance, we _all_ have a sordid past."

"Um, do we?" Kaidan interjected, trying to keep the fooling around sort of more rounded. He discovered himself once again admitting that, ultimately, it was fun to have Williams around, even if he always ended up at the center of her crosshairs, one way or another.

She ran with it. "Yeah, it's just a matter of colorfulness, LT. Yours' freaky glowy sordid, mine's ostracism and shotguns sordid, and here Chief Stearn's is… misterious-British flan-sordid!"

"'Misterious-British'. I like that."

"Yeah, so lets exchange sordidly closeted skeletons. It'll be fun!"

But Stearn wouldn't budge. "I must sordidly decline."

"This is no ancient Rome, no declensions allowed, Stearn. Aw, come oooon!"

Now Stearn was openly smiling, which was a feat in itself. Kaidan ought to congratulate her later.

"Nnnope, Ma'am. It's for your own good. You don't want the gray hairs."

Kaidan chimed in again: "I'm sort of inmunized in that department, thanks to her—ow, stop that!" Williams' elbowing actually hurted a little.

And then Stearn grabbed a bar tagged in furious pink, examining it with uncertain eyes that, suddenly, turned wide open—smile gone rictus—then began to narrow down to a pair of quite dangerous-looking slits. Kaidan didn't recognize that color code. The service chief certainly did, and it clearly bothered him. Lots, judging from his change of attitude

"What's this… _thing_… doing in here?" He wielded the snack against them like proof of some terrible crime. "Is this some kind of—"

Williams snatched it from his finger in a feline swipe. "Hey, leave my lucky bar alone, chief, It's mine mine mine," and brought it to her bosom, protecting it with her whole arms while pouting. "You poor little thing, come to momma…" Despite this strange growing sense of weirdness out of nowhere, it made Kaidan laugh.

"C'mon, Williams, don't be like—" Then it suddenly dawned on him. "Wait, what? Your lucky—?"

Stearn interrupted him, addressing Williams. "So that bar—You… didn't know?"

She glanced at both of them, an uncertain laugh in her voice. "Huh? Didn't know what? The rumors? No. I mean, sorta, yeah but, c'mon, Lance…"

Kaidan wanted to confirm. "Williams, are we talking 'I'm feeling lucky' here? You don't realize—"

"She was warned, wasn't she?" Stearn's eyes had gone from irritated to serious and concerned, devoid of any comedy, which triggered Kaidan's alarm bells. Was she, ever? _Oh, no, please… _Both men crossed worried looks, then their eyes fell on hers and her somewhat disconcerted smile.

"Ash, tell me you haven't eaten any of those yet. You didn't, did you?"

"Mmm… And what if I did?" Still playful, although not by much, perplexity and annoyance beginning to gain ground.

"Ash, I'm serious: you could quite literally—"

She flaunted her I'm-so-two-miles-ahead-of-you sneery smile. Not quite as solid as usual, though. "You guys are sooo bullshitting me, aren't you?"

"No, we are not, Ma'am!"

_Note to self: amend that 'she is so much fun' line of yours. And no geeky progeny, alas_. Because, decidedly, Ashley Madeline Williams was the most exasperating woman Kaidan had met _ever_. He tried again. "Ashley, is not what you think, please let me explain—"

She let out a tentative last nervous laughter. "LT, chief, honestly, what the—"

"Ma'am, with all due respect, will you please shut the fuck up and _listen to him_!"

That did it, the wrong way. As mercurial as ever, Williams' eyes steeled instantly, and her tone adquired a definite edge.

"I think I can imagine what that respect amounts to right now, can't I?"

"Well… Well then, yes, Ma'am!" Stearn blurted, looking a little desperate there. He had gone too far already, although Kaidan knew he had beyond good reason to do so.

He tried to intercede. "Ash, please. He knows what he's—"

She ignored him completely, her cryonic stare on Stearn. "Is that your supposed British education in action, chief?"

"That's me trying to save your skin, Ma'am. And your gustatives, and your stomach lining, and, I daresay, your shitting machinery's plumbing!"

"I'm no damsel in distress, Chief Stearn."

He knew that line._ Uh, oh._ And Stearn's was losing patience fast, too. And, daresayings-wise, there was more to this than simply trying to get across the danger she was in. A certain wounded pride that, ultimately, was always meant to manifest itself in some form or another.

"Make that a damsel in a sickbay bed mattress, if you really intend to eat that… unutterable crap. It's your funeral, Ma'am, really!"

"Oh, yeah? Well, give me a Viking one, then, _really_!"

"Isn't that against your religion, or something?"

"We Williams are eclectic."

"And just how… eclectic?"

Kaidan felt like witnessing some spectacularly bad buddy action holo's climatic yelling scene. Their staring at each other was something out of… well, out of some episode of Hyper Rangers, or the ages-old morning cartoon traditions he was so snobbishly fond of during his childhood. _This is ridiculous: just a minute ago we were—_

Then Ash, with a ferocity in her eyes and a smile that wasn't really such, slowly and deliberately peeled the top of the bar's wrapping. Which exasperated Stearn no end.

"Oh, for Godsakes, you—Ma'am, are you fucking batshit nuts?"

_Dammit, Lance, not again…_ Now he'd have to really take control of the situation before Williams crushed Stearn.

"You are so gonna gimme twenty, chief," she cackled, satisfied. Which was kinda good, or better than any alternative. "And you are so gonna back me up here, LT." Which was… ah… not so better.

"Whatever it takes for you to drop that shit! Ma'am!" Stearn was nearly snarling. Kaidan couldn't believe it.

_Great! And 'my dad is bigger than yours' at the count of three, of course. Will these two—!_ He ought to be used to Williams' tauntings and flare-ups already, but then he should have anticipated Stearn's threshold being rather low after these long weeks of absolutely nothing to do at all. And Williams should know better than playing being an ass with a Torfan survivor veteran whose only perspective for this whole Saren mission thing was to stay stewing and twiddling his thumbs down here while she had all the fun, thanks to Shepard's penchant for… for unorthodox blingy mixed species team-ups, or whatever.

This was his fault, too. Hell, how did he not realize what a pressure cooker Marine Country had become of late?

_Perhaps because you were oh-so-busy trying not to end up like him that you completely neglected your duties, you staff lieutenant of the staffy staffity staff you!_

_Shit, just g_reat. Well… Anyway, he had to stop this. "Chief—Ash…"

She turned on to him, snarky. "WHAT?" And then, as usual, the afterthought. "…Sir!"

Which, suddenly, he wasn't in the mood for, anymore. _You know? I can play this game too, and guess what, I'm guaranteed a win._

"Okay, enough with you two! You just calm down. Now! You too, Stearn! Ashley, that thing in your hand, it's actually dangerous, and the chief here knows it from experience, life-or-death experience, and nearly losing his posting in the process."

Williams cocked her irate head, clearly suspicious.

"What do you mean?"

Finally, he had her undivided atention.

"That bar could be literally poisonous. Lance was pranked into eating one a few months ago, and Chakwas had to ER him back to Earth: induced cryo-coma, two weeks of nanocleaning and tissue printing, rehab… the full rigmarole. He got back on his feet-certified hardly four days before shakedown day."

"Felt fairly Viking burial-like, if I might say so," added Stearn, no trace of humor in his voice.

Williams' irritation gave way to a last hint of incredulity before her plain raw astonishment.

"But… but this makes no sense at all. If it is that dangerous, why is that freakin' thing kept in the menu, then?"

"Why? Oh, I'll tell you why." Kaidan sort of snorted, bile in his throat. That had been the biggest of many protracted wars between the crew and the shipbuilding teams. 'The users are the losers' was the concluding Jokerism. "Because those cretins at Life Support Tech R&D decided… They just—Argh, because we won't dare mess with their Autochef's lunatic programming: it's a mishmash of Turian neuronal blackbox objects and Alliance functional modeling glue code, down to the _freakin'_ user interface. And after Stearn's little adventure in… in practical schatology, we were meant to get a standard unit to replace it anyway, but Eden Prime fubared the whole schedule and we are stuck with it, so from the beginning we've had to endure the worst food flavor transcode ever, from levo to dextro to levo, in perceptual lossy, which is the biggest joke because the Turian-to-Human LUT and its symmetrical are so full of holes that the perceptual side of things is not so much lossy as a total loss, let's not talk about—"

"Lieutenant!"

He paused and realized the size of his tirade, the soreness in his throat, the nervous tic in his left temple, and the murmurs coming from Requisitions. Williams looked like being both a bit frightened and possibly a bit worried about him.

"I get it, LT: 'the coffee is bad'. Yeah, I noticed."

He exhaled and pressed a finger against the bridge of his nose. Stearn stood looking aside, perhaps a bit ashamed of him. Deflated, he lowered his voice.

"You just don't know half of it: that coffee is as good as it gets. After weeks of trial and error we managed to isolate the only preset worth the label, everything else being… Look, forget all that, let's get back to that bar of yours and let me explain—"

"Okay. Okay, LT." Williams seemed to acquiesce, deceptively raising his hands in a placating way. "You explain, Stearn pays his dues." And she grinned.

"Thank you. Well, then—what?"

"No good deed nor dubious due respect goes unpunished, LT. So, Lance?"

Stearn's versatile brow pulled an 'oh, really?' and the man dropped to the floor. "Ma'am, yes Ma'am!"

Before Kaidan could say anything else, the service chief began doing pushups. On one arm. Kaidan couldn't decide which of those two insufferable morons he wanted most to deck first. Well, technically speaking, one of them was already… Scrunching his face, he tried to stay on topic.

"Alright, Williams. Simplifying it: you'd think the Autochef's 'I'm feeling lucky' is your typical vendor machine's weighted randomizer flavor selector, or a personal trends-prediction oriented one, or a simpler 'most often chosen" one, the half Alliance-half Turian version, wouldn't you?"

Glaze over. Then a "…huh? Yes. Yeah. That."

_God! Whatever._ "Well, it's not. Nothing in the Normandy is typ—"

Distracted again. By Chief Stearn's whistling some old war movie song, 'the bridge on the river Kway" most likely. Also, the son of a bitch had switched to opposite arm-leg raise pushups, looking so much like a giant spastic toad in looped holo.

"…ical."

"Make that fifty, service chief," ordered Williams, tilting her head toward his subordinate while keeping her eyes on Kaidan's, still grinning, like a maniac.

"Gladly, gunnery chief," hissed Stearn, eyes upfront, grinning like another maniac.

Kaidan stood there, mouth agape, this short of going thermonuclear on them.

_This is not happening, they are not behaving like schoolchildren; I'm not half-naked, trying to level up as if I was a Galaxy of Fantasy PC; harassed by a xenoparanoid shotguns nut and an ancient romance novels hardcore collector; jockeying for fire team position against a Krogan jerk and a sainty Asari; dealing with a bored-horny crew and a crazy commander; and where the fuck is the big undo key in the sky because I need it like fucking right now. That, or these two I kill'em sport… with my mind!_

"How's the view down there, chief?"

"Your dirty boots are in the way, chief."

"Guys…"

"Wanna lick them clean, chief?"

"So, far far beyond eclectic then, aren't we, chief?"

"Is that contempt or a compliment, chief?"

"Chiefs…"

"My misguided admiration, chief."

"I so knew it. Okay, chief, let's talk goats and your sex life."

"Sorry, chief: a true gentleman would never expose the identity of the concerned ladyfriend, no matter her quadrupedism."

Actually, it would be nice not to be nice for a while, considering. Kaidan sighed. He collected himself, reached that inner place that allowed him this certain distance, this certain contentment; calmly decided how he wanted to play this and drew a slow deep breath.

"Ten," he said.

"Haa-ha, chief! As if your… Um, LT? Excuse me, what?"

"Ten," he repeated, nodding in a sageish way. He almost felt ashamed for the theatrics, but then that much aggravation had earned him the right to a little bit of fun at their expense.

"Ten? Hey, chief, make that just ten."

"How generous of you, chief."

"No." Kaidan shook her head at Williams, gently, and insisted. "Ten."

"'Ten… Um, like, 'ten, nine, eight…'?" She flashed her fingers in a countdown. Another negative. "Ten laps around the deck? _I do_ give you ten? Ten little indians?" Head shake again, tolerant expression. "No? Well, then, I… Damn, I just don't follow, LT. A little help?"

"Tennn…?" he singsonged, making a show of there being a follow-up to that, forwarding his hands at her in a demonstrative fashion, an encouraging smile.

"Uh oh…" That one came from below. As usual, Stearn was the sharpest guy in the room. Williams crossed looks with her chief, then with Kaidan—his smile fast turning from encouraging to something else entirely—and her eyes went wide, lips mouthing an inaudible 'oh crap'.

"Ah… Ten…?" Her voice was nearly just a resigned whisper. Kaidan nodded again, approvingly, grinning, like yet another maniac.

And he roared his mightiest 'TEN-HUTT!' ever. Spittle flew. Williams jumped. Stearn froze.

_Mmm, this deck has a real good reverb._

Both chiefs managed to react and stand at attenton. _Silent_ attention. _Good_.

And then Kaidan noticed the now silent chief requisitions officer and his silent crowd looking at them, at him, with sort of a confused blank look in their faces. The ones technically below his grade were standing at attention, training having kicked in nearly without conscious thought, not quite perfecting the requisite stare into infinity due to their bewilderment. A feeling shared across species, seemingly: Garrus, on the Mako's topside cannon, sat there, powertool in claw, slackjawed, mouthplates open. Silent. His toolbox began sliding back without his noticing. Crash noise in five seconds.

Kaidan, his cheeks' muscles rippling out of pure teeth-gnashing frustration, would have cared to warn the Turian if not for this itching distraction, this nagging feeling of there being something missing in this picture, a certain icing on the cake of his misery… _Oh, yeah, of course_. He turned his head toward Wrex' place. The Krogan, arms crossed, looked back, shaking his smug head. As expected, really.

"Wrex…" Kaidan said, frosty non-smile in his lips.

"Alenko…" Wrex riposted, a satisfied 'you are so beneath your Battlemaster' sneer in his.

Crash noise—scratch 'good', make that _fabulous_ reverb—followed by something fierce-sounding in native Turian. Startled, Wrex actually dropped into a crouch and pointed his shotgun at the disturbance, his instincts overriding his composture. Kaidan crossed his arms, mouth twitching against the vindictive grin he was trying to contain.

_There_. Now this perfect storm of stupid was finally complete, as far as he was concerned.

And, just then, he noticed Commander Shepard and Private Fredricks inside the elevator. They had been there who knew for how long, watching it all. Kaidan groaned.

_Shit. I should sell tickets…_

* * *

Author's notes:

First fic. This is me on training wheels. Self-indulgent, overcomplicating things, and ultimately running on empty coasting down the slope. I have a passable idea of the kind of ME stories I want to tell, and I have to start somewhere, so, Gozer help me, this is it.

Kaidan Alenko is the kind of character I usually root for, so he's the central figure in all this sort of amplified, overthought, infantile, inflated and a little bit hysterical version of the Mass Effect universe. Not that I intend to violate canon, although I like to play with certain aspects of it, like the technology, the backstories, the Red Shirts, the dialogs—which won't feature the game's, mostly—and the details of the depicted events: in fact, a blatant example ought to happen a few chapters ahead. So, well… canon won't be broken. Much. I hope. What worries me most is the characters' voices: probably they'll get distorted in places, OOC'd. We'll see what happens.

This story does some real cheap tricks with its own timeline, so lots of small details here and there that will get clarified further along, or in later stories. Here is hoping that this will be more enticing than frustrating. It's not that I intend to be deliberately obscure: it's just that I think it gets to be more fun that way, at least in this case, even if it'll be difficult for you to make heads or tails of it right now.

I'm extremely slow. I've got whole chunks of story to glue yet, so Chapter Two will be real late. The following ones ought to proceed at a faster pace.

Now, a warning: English is not my native language, and I'm bound to have planted a few absolute howlers here and there, so please set your grammar fail EWS at DefCon 1. I'd be grateful for any corrections where needed.

Critique-wise, I'd really, _really_ like to know what you think of this, despite being beyond terrified of that. The formal aspects I assume they are terrible, but here's hoping to being at least a bit entertaining and intriguing.

So this is it. I'd like to express my gratitude to Vshard, who dared read a few bits and pieces and encouraged me to, simply, give it a try and post it, see what happens. I admire her work, so her finding any single little thing of mine interesting or funny feels like gold.

_(Yeah, I know, it's been eons since then, but look, here it is at last)_

Also, my deepest appreciation for Sinvraal's oeuvre: her ME series was a real eye-opener. She was the real catalyst—shame about the results, I guess, but…—and I eagerly await her take on ME3.

Lots of heavy-hitters around to praise, too, but then this would become a parody of Robin Williams' parody of the Oscar ceremony. So, see ya soon—um, yep, right—at Episode Two: Fu Bar.


	2. Fu Bar

Disclaimer: Mass Effect and its characters belong to BioWare & EA Games.  
Reviews are more than welcome. Author's notes at the end of this chapter.

* * *

Liara T'Soni tried again, to no avail: decidedly, her hardsuit wasn't in the mood to show up in the ship's TacNet. Well, she wasn't that eager to go walk to her locker and risk another awkward encounter with Chief Williams, either, so she tried to ping it through her gadgets' own private network—the Netsoni, the pilot had said one day at the mess hall table, watching her and Lieutenant Alenko fiddle with her tools to harden them up to Alliance-level crypto, the little strange man laughing that frankly stupid laugh of his at his own occurrence. One of these days she was to teach him what 'Jeffrey' sounded so alike to in NorSerriTec Uni's student slang, Thessian wordplays-wise. _No, you are not. You'd out-blush him, for a start, and once it made the rounds, nobody would regard you in the same light. Williams, for one, could begin to actually like you, imagine that. On second thought, no, don't imagine that: it's too disturbing._

The suit pinged back, alive. What then?

She was in her little private kingdom, the medbay's storage room, abusing CMO Chakwas' equipment, trying to pull a reading off some datacache they had found in one of those pyramidal timecapsules the Protheans were so morbidly fond of. As usual, the atomechanical device's sand grain-sized controller cubes had rot into real sand grain matter, dumb as such, but the recording medium posessed so much data redundancy that it was relatively easy to patch the whooping holes its degradation had produced. Making sense of it all was another thing entirely, a battlefield of the mind, her preferred one, but first things—pretty obnoxious irritating tiresome things—first.

Liara glanced at the artifact, under sensor siege. Resting her chin in her hand, she decided to regard it with a certain compassion. It didn't deserve her disdain, this ancient machine, such success story of persistence and resilience, still salvageable after the pass of ages. Deep frustration, it tended to do that to her. Things weren't going her way.

Always the completist, Liara needed the data in her hardsuit. She had transplanted most of the discrete scanners she had carried embedded in her fieldclothing to the armor that Shepard had provided her with. The usual environment ladar-surveying and holographing tasks she was more than happy to leave to its sensor suite, fairly adequate for an Alliance military set. Her instruments were more about radioactivity or Dark Energy trace-based dating, geomapping, things like that. They provided her findings with context in an effortless way, just by her random walking on-site. And she needed that context: it gave her clues, and clues gave her shortcuts, and she didn't have all the time in the world any longer.

A bleep made her turn her eyes to the workstation, see the flagged diagnostic, curse in silence. Her scans were coming up all blurry, again. The equipment she was using was some dual head medical interferometer job, more than enough for Chakwas' needs, quite lacking for hers, and prone to some unstabilities. She would have needed more source heads, and what she needed she didn't have, so it was multipass all over again, triple her work.

All her specialized equipment had been lost on Therum, and they weren't something you could simply place an order for in some extranet shop. There was some base kit she had asked the University's skunk works department for. Not exactly pocket money, forget about that nice omni-tool fabricator upgrade she was so looking forward to gift herself with, or that fancy food printing field minikitchen she so lusted for.

Yes, she'd had their fab-templates emailed to her, but the Normandy's omnigel reserves weren't formulated to be rasterized into those, Asari optronics deriving from different materials science's industrial spinoffs just this little inconvenient bit. Also, there was some reference target calibration involved, which usually would require her to get back to Thessia, something she was too afraid to ask for, not ready to test Commander Shepard's amiability. Not ready to discover she could very well be a prisoner of war.

Elbows on the table, Liara held her head in both hands, her little fingers rubbing the wrinkle in the bridge of her nose, watching the incompetent machine talk to the workstation, her disembodied VIs tut-tutting at its output. Goddess, she missed her little toys so much, she sometimes felt silly tears of frustration pushing for a bit of an outbreak. They had seen her go from clumsy apprentice to consumate Prothean artifact restorer and dataminer, one of her few sources of pride. She had spent decades honing their little Virtual Intelligences' abilities and personalities to excel out of their idiosyncratic hardware, and they had become her companions in the solitude of fieldwork. Now, mere backup copies playing emulated ghosts in the Normandy's procservers and her old omni-tool, lacking their physicallity, their trusty tactility, they felt off, foreign, alien. And so she felt truly alone in this human ship, no matter how civil her crew tried to behave toward this terribly young, terribly shy, fairly unknown quantity of an Asari.

'Unknown quantity', that was the mildest thing she had heard Chief Williams call her. 'Enemy agent' was the first one.

_She's going to kill you, mother._

She had lost hope for any other outcome weeks ago.

_The commander, Lieutenant Alenko, Garrus, Tali'zorah, the Krogan… They all are ready for that, their first option, despite their vague caveats and half-hearted assurances. Too many dead on your account, if you truly are complicit in that colony's massacre and the Thorian debacle._ She was so certain: _I'll be there_—how could she not go with them to face her, hear the truth from her lips?—_and that will mean I'll have to betray you, help them end your life. They'll all but demand that from me, as proof of my trustworthiness, and I'm so desperate for their approval that I can't trust myself._

Since being told what her mother was suspected of being an accessory to, Benezia had been carefully kept a jumble of blurred memories in her head. She wasn't bold enough to put her back into focus, make her real enough to challenge her with the charges, truly submerge herself in the terrible surreality of it all.

She soon would have to. A few days from now they would drop themselves on Noveria and pursue her mother. Spectre intel, she had been told, had Benezia playing Saren's delegate, executing on some of the renegade Spectre's corporate interests. Too damning to allow for finer point talks. Liara felt petrified.

Shuddering, with an effort that felt physical enough, she voided her mind. All that remained wasn't a trace of anguish but, funnily enough, deep irritation. She stabbed the bench's comm holo.

"NavCom: Doctor T'Soni," she spoke, in the clipped manner she had seen the crew use."

"Miss T'Soni! What can I do for you?"

Lieutenant Moreau's voice, always so equivocal. She held a rather precarious understanding of human voicetone nuances, but the pilot was a pretty known quantity. 'Enemy agent', yes, that would fit, like a glove. She hated his 'miss', so overloaded with false asumptions and—_Oh, to the abyss with it! I'll just have to endure him._

"I was trying to get access to my suitrecorder's enviro data on our last sortie, to contextualize my last Prothean findings. I can't seem to find my suit anywhere in the network: I am getting neither gestalt nor devices' IDs in any of my assigned subnodes."

Pause.

_Pause?_

"Um. You shouldn't need to do that. I mean, all suitrecorded data gets stored in the relevant Ops stack, so—"

"I understand that, lieutenant—"

"It's Joker, Liara. No need to be that formal, remember?"

Sinuous overtones, enemy agent. _I certainly remember, never ever engage in—oh, alright!_

"Ah… Joker, yes. As I was saying, I understand that. The problem is that I have a set of custom sensors that the Ops system has no codecs for yet, so their data won't show up. And I can't access the raw record because my access privileges are… constrained," _to say the least._ "The most direct way to get it is by tunneling through the suit. But I can't find it. Could you check…"

"Yeah, I see. I mean, I don't see it, either. Were your suits' countermeasures on the last time you hit ground? Perhaps the power packs have run out of juice and it's entered deep sleep mode, or—"

_What's all this absolute beginner nonsense of his? _"It pings back through my old private network."

"Crap, the Netso—oouuhh, I see: can you get the data through it, then?"

"Not without difficulty: my instruments dump it inside the suit's storage pool, and they are slaved to its microframe, which I cannot access. I think I could reverse the hierarchy somehow, but I rather don't: Lieutenant Alenko was very insistent on using the proper protocols." _Oh, I'm such an idiot._ "I shouldn't have pinged them in the first place, I realize now…"

"Yeah, well, too late for that."

He seemed irritated, and she'd rather end this conversation as soon as possible. Better to concede the point, then.

"I see, I ought to have gone belowdecks and explained my difficulties to him. I'll do so when I check the suit. I guess I'll OSD the data—"

"Uuuh… I don't think he needs to know, just a little innocent slip of your mind, who cares, don't be so hard on yourself, it's simply—"

"It's not a problem, really, Lieu—Joker. Thank you. T'Soni out."

"Ah—"

And she cut the channel. Lieutenant Alenko's migraines surely had to feel like she did every time she had to deal with the ship's pilot. What a headache of a human.

Oh! Lieutenant Alenko… Wasn't he practicing his biotics down there? He had asked her for some guidance in producing a vertifloat—'lift', in their terminology—and she had declined to help. She was sincere when she told him that she wouldn't know where to start: only the Asari and Volus species, along their ecosystems' fauna and flora, had developed real Eezo biofeedback systems in their biologies. The whole idea of mnemonic triggering seemed desperately primitive to her. Even so…

She should have been more supportive, made an attempt. He was kind to her, and she had repaid him with evasives. There, guiltiness, another reason to avoid the storage deck. She disgusted herself.

_Goddess, I so need a coff—_

NO! She didn't! She caught her traitorous mind before it got away with murder._ No! Not coffee! I don't want coffee, I don't need the coffee, I don't like the coffee…_

She grimaced.

…_But the coffee likes me, argh. Where's my stamb?_

At her right side, on the floor's crate, beside her few effects left. She reached for her thermo of stambaoi and took a deep sip straight from it, hot, creamy and minty spicy liquid going down her stomach, up her spine until doing its small explosion thing in her brain and staying there. Satisfied—she kept on trying to convince herself—she reached for her happiest memories as a student: long nights of prepping for the final exams, she and her flatmates burning through so much subject matter in so little time, drinking stamb by the truckload to stay awake, ending up flaring like fireflies, their nervous systems so amped that their biotics went that slightly out of control, laughing at their feelings of academic doom and bad posh jokes.

Shepard liked it. She had managed the courage to invite Shepard to try it, and he had liked it, asked her for one of the little bottles of stamb concentrate that she had bought at their last Citadel stopover, promised to bring more aboard during the next resupply visit.

_My fascinating human commander likes it…_

She smiled this her 'what are you up to, my little wing' smile. It soon turned rueful, bringing the memory of her mother to the fore of her mind, this now sharp image of a sharper woman pulling a face: of light scolding, mixed with complicity, with smart and measured warmth. From far before Liara was able to start feeling strongly enough about things to butt heads with her. Shepard merited feeling strongly about.

She sighed. Poured some stamb into her jar and sipped it little by little, taking time to really taste the flavor, appreciate the familiar in this strange environment. This jail, quite possibly.

She still missed the coffee. It wasn't amusing. Her smile turned into a little frown.

_If you've got to think about coffee, think of those last three days of abstinence syndrome. Stupid drink, stupid human custom, stupid you, so trying to mesh with them to get to the commander. Stupid stupid stupid! Alien addictive substances 101, please, you knew perfectly well what would happen._

Liara dropped her head, groaning, and again massaged her nose bridge, her forehead, her fringes' roots, finally resting a cheek on her left arm laying on the table. Melancholy was her. A fleeting smile managed to make it back. Wasn't it, always?

Her fingertips toyed with the empty jar, glowing a tiny mass effect field, making it bob over her hand. Delicately, she grabbed it back and eyed it critically. No, it wasn't so always. Remember the lieutenant's words, her wacky new mantra: 'action archeologist'!

_Alright, then, you silly winglet, time to break out the metaphorical bullwhip! _The Prothean artifact and the equipment surrounding it trembled under her glare, and rightly so: if those sensors didn't get their act together, it was going to be crushing giant round boulder time.

Action archeologist. She would need to feel the part, if she was to descend to the storage deck.

* * *

**Fu Bar**

"Okay, people, what's going on here?"

Oh, he knew perfectly well what was going on. Just Williams being her usual overwhelmingly insufferable self around the Lieutenant, and Alenko being so inexplicably unable to keep her on a leash from the start until her bullshit hit his fan. He should read them the riot act, put a full stop to her constant disrespect and near-insubordination, call his incompetence and lack of command, make them take a good big look at themselves, tell them to grow up, act like pros. What was with this ship that made everyone aboard her a fool of themselves?

_Myself included, I guess._

Because, in the end, Shepard liked them so much, warts and all. Never thought captaining a ship would make him feel so… paternal about her crew, so secretly permissive despite his somewhat sterny ways. _Oh, I'm not sterny!_

Not that much around her, at least. Cooky ship, cooky crew, cooky chief, cooked commander. _Anderson, you oh–so–straightfaced-selfsacrificing-yeah-right bastard, I'm so gonna get back at you…!_

He smiled to himself. Who was he kidding? He loved the man, his style, even if it wasn't anything like his own. He understood the brutal sacrifice that giving up this command meant, aspirations and career-wise; how much faith in him it implied. The way this veteran had placed duty and mission above all, he wouldn't dare disappoint him. _Despite you dropping me straight into this human menagerie of stark raving mad people, you brilliant sonovagun!_ He wondered how the captain had tracked and grabbed each and every one of this idiosyncratic team of men and women. He suspected their former COs were all too happy to get themselves well rid of such weirdos, not realizing the true gems they were. Anderson had managed to turn them into a cohesive crew somehow, beginning to rub their edges smooth—save Joker's: the guy was just impossible!—and coating a veneer of hardass professionalism upon them. Not entirely succesful at that, not enough actual mission time to put their collective backbone to the test. He would have to teach them that individualism and eccentricism were an earned privilege instead of a given. Genius didn't impress him that much, so beware!

He had to get what really did impress him across to them. Fast.

Because Shepard knew the love affair was to die soon. He hadn't been managing this correctly. He should have started as a martinet, iron grip, then ease out and reward excellence with measured familiarity, 'degrade' the ship's discipline down to his ways and temperament, this special recipe of no-bullshit bullshitting. He had been to be harder on them, raise the bar, overdo it a bit, then get back to a comfortable level. Instead, the chain of events leading him to shoulder this mission had swamped him: neither time nor preparation enough to project his authority properly. By the manner in which he had been stumbling his way after Saren—the most uncomprehensible and dangerous target he had ever chased—he knew he had regressed big time before the quirkiest crew ever, all too ready to eat him alive.

Knowing himself… He would get fed up with it way soon, given his irritability due to the insomnia and the nightmares and the ridiculous delays and sidetreks; or somebody would get definitely too smartass for his own good—his money was on Moreau—or fubar hard—disquietingly, his money was on Alenko—and he would explode, his barking show unbalancing everything. So, looking forward to the inevitable tempest. He hoped he had some room to maneuver and adjust things, but…

Oh, enough with the doom and gloom! Despite everything, his doubts and fears, this was just such perverse fun! The bureaucratics of managing a ship he could do without—and thank God for his XO—but handling this crew, their little intrigues and schemes, amused him to no end. It was a special kind of busy that helped him forget for a while the weight of the responsability, the not wanting to screw up. A certain amount of levity was something they needed badly, after bearing witness to two human colony massacres, losing one of their own in the process; after learning it could only get far, far worse; after his reliving every night since Eden Prime just how much worse, exactly.

Needed. Fun. Lots. Always up to a point, mind you.

He peeked at his side. Poor Private Fredricks, there beside him in the elevator cage, had been fidgeting like a schoolboy watching his parents do a scene before his teacher. It had been amusing to watch—though not quite clearly hear—the lieutenant growing desperate at Williams and Stearn's strange doings, until suddenly turning sort of kind and calm and monkish-gentle, then erupting into the 'ten-hutt' to end them all, everyone on deck frozen. Vakarian had sort of crashed the moment. _Heh heh, 'crashed'…_

He had wondered if joining them would be that for the best, Stearn being the single most important point of contention between him and the lieutenant. Well, this was him holding out an olive branch, somewhat out of character. As personally friendly as Alenko behaved, this certain professional reserve he showed spoke of frustration and disagreement with his tactics, at least at an intellectual, post-op analytical level—never in the field: there he was loyal and near-superb. Shepard wished for, wanted his confidence, his belief in him. It was an unexpected realization.

Anyway, he needed the distraction. Alenko's SuperRangerSomething antics notwithstanding, yesterday had been an utterly dull day of administrative and investigative work, he mostly consulting with XO Pressly, CybInt Grenado and her people, readying intel and logistics support petitions to send to both Fifth Fleet and the Citadel Council. Today was meant to be a mildly boring one, too, the Normandy doing an intrasector FTL run toward the chain of incredibly trivial merc/slaver/geth/whathaveyou cases that Admiral Hackett needed scratched out of his list. Given recent developments, he didn't begrudge them terribly much: those were team integration study opportunities. His unconventional human-alien hybrid team, that is.

To enliven things up, Williams had started that Rosenkov business they were to play their part in sometime during the afternoon, and he had agreed to babysit her men during his exercise time. He had roped Fredricks in already, hoped to get Stearn aboard, Boudiaf too—the guy said he was to be free soonish—and wondered if he could distract Williams from her new toys for a little while. As much as he'd rather train solo, tuning out everything and everyone but his playlist, Shepard was feeling curious about this, playing teacher, after so much time since his last. Also, he felt even more curious yet about her as both a trainee and a trainer, knowing she was reputed as an excellent mentor herself. Williams was to direct the weapons tryout, and he looked forward to let her take command of that situation. To spice it, he was determined to involve her in this morning's training session, see how that would color things when she gained the upper hand that afternoon. Shepard knew Williams would test him, looked forward to it. _Careful what you wish for…_ She could turn your tamest tic-tac-toe into a battle of the wills and the skills and the sexes, out of sheer competitiveness… or simply on a playful whim. _Heh, that woman…_

His kind of woman, he reflected: this precise combination of exuberance, tomboyism, shoulder-chippery, brashness, and ultimate self-respect. Damn good-looking, too: not your conventionally spectacular cookie-cutter hottie but something far more particular and interesting and engaging… if somewhat inaccesible: not just a regs issue but this way she had of showing how beyond his reach, anyone's reach she was, how you'd have to work hard to earn her, deserve her, measure up. And he was more than fine with that, with the contrast between her outer brazen one-of-the-boys grunt and her inner dame. It surprised Shepard how comfortable he felt around her, how easily he could allow himself to really care for her, to savor the attraction, to prod her barriers and advance or burn in turn. This game they played, it posed a problem, command-wise, but it made for such interesting self-discovery.

Shepard had already met her today, upstairs in the mess hall, just after his matinal paperwork round up session—this dreadful thing he had inflicted to himself after hardly two hours of genuine sleep among the nightmares. Right then her laughter had been his lifesaver. And so they had talked, teased, dared each other and mostly fallen into their usual silly flirty act, until things got this bit extra hotter, so time to back off, backpedal, back to the starting line. Oh, just your typical daily episode of The Shepard & Williams Show. But…

Well, something new had happened: she had kept the upper hand the whole time, of course, but instead of simply let him go lick his verbal fencing wounds, she had just… stayed there, holding him in her gaze, smiling, uncertain, glowing. And he'd been… How to best explain it? Basking in her light, as corny as it sounded. Wishing to stay, wanting more. There was a degree of lust involved—tempered, careful—but it was far, far from being the whole story.

She had been the first to recover, salute him away, both reluctant to separate. When he had closed the door of his cabin, he had stood there for a little while, smiling like an idiot, trying to keep the sensation from disappearing away, feeling child-like, feeling good. And, truth be told, weirdly, stupidly happy.

It was all a bit worrying. He knew there was a danger here, all the reasons why he ought to put an end to it. She had to know that, too: she was smart. Even so, there they were, playing with fire in spite of everything. It made Shepard wonder.

Made him hope for an encore, too: he wanted to explore this thing. Realistically, though, that wouldn't happen until much later in the day. Right now, things would be too busy on the storage deck. Surrounded by the crew, Williams was to be her usual cocky irreverent self, driving Alenko, Emerson and the resident aliens nuts.

But then again there she was now, 'ten-hutted' by the lieutenant, spraining something, bootcampish, somehow younger, and pretty damn cute. He wouldn't dare tell her that: she'd skin him alive! Shepard enjoyed the view for a few seconds… until he noticed that she, Alenko and Stearn were watching him back, from the corner of their eyes, and Fredo was shifting his weight from foot to foot, restless.

Well, time to make an entrance, see what the hell was that thing they were fussing so much about—it looked like a snack bar. The last chocolate-flavored one in the whole ship, surely? Mutinies had started for far more trivial reasons. He hated chocolate.

So he had smothered his smile into the kind of questioning half-smirk he knew wasn't that easy to read and quite easy to be paranoid about—specially while wearing his PT gear: shorts, T-shirt and running shoes, so equivocal in its plain Marine ordinariness—quickly covered the distance, with Fredricks in tow, and confronted the trio. Stearn was quite well poker-faced. Williams was… mmm… humble. Wow. And Alenko was… half-naked, capped, looking so much like a clubber with a mild retrocyber fetish, and trying to smooth out a rather biggie frown.

Alenko saluted. "Commander…"

Shepard did likewise and zeroed on Chief Williams. "Much ado about something in your hand, isn't there, Williams?"

She looked at the half-peeled snack bar in her right hand, as if surprised by its continuing existence, then she appeared to relax, to interpret his presence as a grant of some extra leeway. _Well, being honest…_ but she ought to measure herself far, far more prudently. He had set a bad example, no wonder Alenko was having so much trouble controlling her.

"Just a little misunderstanding, skipper."

She glanced at the lieutenant, who seemed to think it better than launch himself into an explanation, rather letting it rest.

"The issue soon solved itself, commander."

"With a little help from your lungful, I reckon," he pointed out, then folding his arms.

"You could say that, sir," the guy accepted, a sheepish half-smile sunrising over his expression of fastidious patience.

Shepard stepped forward and, leaning toward Williams, whispered to her ear, not really attempting to be discreet.

"No respect for the uniform, I see."

"Hardly any uniform to speak of, skipper," she replied in kind.

"Mmm," and he threw a fast onceover at Alenko, who thinned his lips into a neutral if somewhat self-deprecating, self-conscious look. He supposed that the man was aware of the effect he had on the crew. Didn't seem to enjoy it much, though. "Fair enough."

Fredricks indicated his intention to go get the mats and the other training equipment. Straightening up, Sheppard dismissed him and concentrated back on this his particular duo of terror plus extracalm sidekick.

"Can I…?" Shepard extended his hand toward Williams'.

"Uh…" She glanced questioningly at Alenko, while slowly guiding the bar into Shepard's hand. The lieutenant's smile faltered and gave way to worried uncertainty. At that, Stearn's imperturbability died to the same concerned look, which was fairly odd, as far as he knew the guy.

Shepard delicately grabbed the bar by the remains of its wrapping—_Pink? What's with pink lately? Is it the new black?_—and brought it to eye-level. Chocolate? Perhaps, but what a hideous texture, and strangely aromaless. Anyway…

"Okay, guys. I have two options here: first, the King Solomon one…"

"Our commander the Herod of the Alliance…" Williams said, her good humor somewhat hitting a false note, still nervously eyeing Alenko. Curious. "Being an eldest sister, I sympathize."

That made him smile. _I was an eldest brother, too._ He wondered if she knew the precise details. They hadn't touched that topic in their conversations yet, but it was everywhere in the extranet, just a codex search away, thanks to the media blitz accompanying his appointment as the first human Spectre. Better to steer clear of the issue, save her from the potential awkwardness.

"Glad to see you approve, chief. Still, you know, being the skipper has its privileges: the second option is… warship democracy in action!" He was to be infuriating, let them try to catch that—

Ash tilted his head a little, unimpressed and waggish. "Let me guess: one man, one vote."

Stearn fell into step without a hitch, pointing with his hand at him: "'…you the man…"

Alenko tilted his head a little, clearly amused: "…yours the vote."

Caught. Damn, was he ever going to get to the punchline first?

"Aw, Williams, why you guys never humor me in public?" He gestured at the crewmates around and lifted his brow. Her real grin was finally there in its full glory, up to her usual unapologetical standards. _That's more like it._

"Social suicide cramps my style, boss."

"Hah, you wuss."

"_Me_ wuss? I've danced with you. Publicly, remember? I'd say that satisfies any reasonable quota."

"Great: and so you wound me, again."

"Oh, c'mon, you are such a child!"

Alenko had sort of kept himself aside, a faint concerned smile on his lips. He cleared his throat ostensibly. _Yeah_, Shepard realized, _we are at it again. Let's rein this back a little_.

"Sir, I'd be far less worried if you'd let me dispose of that bar. It's not what you—"

"Let me solve that one for you, guys. Ooooom…!" He angled up his head and opened his mouth wide, flying the thing toward it, so like his mother used to do with the spoon when feeding his little brother, amusing the toddler into eating off the pretend shuttle. Alleged chocolate bar, you have permission to land. Chocolate, gah! The sacrifices he had to—

"NO!"

A discordant chord, a jumble of distorted voices—this deck had the strangest reverb—the sudden collective cry pretty nearly made him jump back. _Wha—?_ Head still angling up, his eyes wide open, focusing downward, all Shepard managed to perceive was some motion-blurred chimera of a lieutenant and a couple of chiefs, a mass of arms and claws avalanching on him—he would have sworn there was a whoosh and everything—and then the snack was no longer in his hand but in Alenko's, the lieutenant looking quite surprised by his own temerity, the others looking alternatively at both of their superior officers, more desperate than terrified. The way Alenko pulled an all too fragile sterner façade, it seemed more out of a hasty afterthought than real conviction.

Himself, he was left feeling a bit confused: _What did they just…_ And a bit concerned: _Damn, imagine this had been a close combat thing…_ And this bit outraged: _Well, hey now!_

Shepard sighed a little, dialed up his half-smirk into the megawatt range, and mercilessly focused it on the lieutenant.

"Um, Alenko?"

"Er… commander…"

"You grabbed my snack."

Alenko, still a little lost, gave a quick glance at the bar in his hand.

"'Your—uh, yes, Sir, I did. It's not a snack, though. It's—"

"Well, it looks like one to me. Give it back?"

"Ah… I can't do that, Sir. I'll explain—"

"You can't do that. I see. Interesting…" So interesting, he wanted to do a little experiment.

"Sir, I really mean it. This thing is truly dan—"

"What if I order you to hand it back?"

"Commander… Okay, I'd comply, of course, with the condition that you'd let me expl—"

With gently menace, he cut him short. "No: you'll hand it back this instant, period."

And he would stand there, sizing up the lieutenant, questioning, smirky. Shepard wouldn't even need to raise his voice. He was perfectly aware of his reputation, and wasn't afraid to wield it. Wasn't prone to do it needlessly, either, but curiosity got the best of him. He felt sorry for Alenko, who was looking at him obliquely, a bit wild-eyed and open-mouthed, but he couldn't help himself but try this man's mettle, prod him a little more.

"Now, lieutenant."

Alenko, closed his mouth, clenched his jaw… and exhaled, slowly, composing himself, exuding rightness, no mean feat taking his ridiculous guise into account.

"No, Sir. You are not getting it back, and most definitely you are not eating it."

Intriguing. Not only Alenko was insubordinating himself—and Williams peeing in her pants, watching their little scene with horror—but the guy's regained composure felt so easily won that it made Shepard smile. Okay, so he must have some very good reason to deny him this… ah… antiprotons-flavored grenade of a snack bar, or something. He'd better have.

"You are serious."

"I am. Sir, you simply don't realize you just almost killed yourself."

_What's he talking about? _"Care to elaborate?"

"This…" and he raised the snack to eye level, "is an 'I'm feeling lucky' bar, Sir," sighed Alenko, in a patient, knowing, even slightly condescending tone, as if that phrase meant all the condemnation the stupid snack required. Well, Shepard still didn't get it, at all.

"Aaaand…?"

"Why, they're deadly, of course," Alenko said, slowly, eyeing him with growing puzzlement.

"The 'luckies'… Are poisonous…"

Alenko's incomprehension gave way to some pretty credible confusion. Shepard's was far grander.

_Is he fucking with me?_

Because it made no sense otherwise. This had to be some sort of elaborate joke after all. Who knows, perhaps they were atempting to cheer him up, of all things. He felt inside a harsh groan trying to break out.

"Well… yes," was Alenko's tardy answer, a mite impatient, which didn't do any good to Shepard's humor.

He hadn't the right to assume things, but then he'd relied on Alenko being the straight honest guy in the middle of this madhouse, some rock to lean on. Seeing him try the convincingly sincere trickster routine—and fail badly, at that—felt so out of character, and so irrationally disappointing… He had enough clowns around for his staff lieutenant to join the troupe, dammit!

"Yyyyep. And the assassin was Coronel Mustard, with a poisonous snack bar, at the engine room, am I right?"

"Coronel… Mus—?" Alenko blinked, perplex. "Beg your pardon—?"

"C'mon, lieutenant, spare me the bullshit." He had managed to turn it into a half-laugh out of his duty to keep morale up, despite suddenly feeling so fed up with it all, the relaxed discipline, the casualness, the everybody wanting to get away with murder while he did his mightiest to keep his mission, his post and his mind from flying apart.

Stearn appeared to be as mystified as Alenko. Then the chief half-gasped, achieving some realization. "Perhaps the Commander isn't aware—"

_I'm not aware of what?_

"But how couldn't he—damn, okay. I'll… Commander: are you familiar with the chief's medical record?"

"Huh? No, not really. Beyond his latest physical fitness report, I leave such matters to Doctor Chakwas," Shepard said, maintaining his calm.

"I see. Well, if you dig inside it you'll find noted there that he suffered an extreme case of poisoning by eating an "I'm feeling—"

Whatever remained of his patience went up in flames. This was actually tiresome!

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Kaidan, drop it already, will you? It's not gonna work. Look, the very first thing I did when I came aboard was eat a couple of 'luckies'—"

"YOU… DID… WHAT?"

Choruslined with extreme prejudice, this time Shepard really jumped back. Alenko had stepped into his personal space, furiously drilling his eyes with his disbelieving gaze, Stearn echoing him, while Williams looked at both her chief and the lieutenant, angry as hell.

"You… you fucking liars!" she spat, a murderous rictus of a teeth-baring grin.

"Not so, Williams! You can ask Chakwas." Alenko wouldn't face her, so intent on performing visible spectrum-based mineral resources prospection on his commander's eyeballs. It was a little frightening. "You… ate…"

"Well, yes, it's the first thing I did, eat a couple." Shepard felt actually defensive, which was absolutely ridiculous.

"But… but… Why?"

Why? Why were _they_ being so dense, more like it! Prank done, case closed, already, he hoped, so something there surely was escaping him, but… _Okay, let's give them enough rope, see what happens._

"Because I was famelic?"

Perhaps there was a chance of all this being actually hilarious in some obscure way, given the faces they were pulling. Perhaps the joke was on them, and this was one of Moreau's machinations. Alenko's slackjawed mouth had grown so wide open that he felt the urgent need to close it manually, or suspend a coat hanger there.

"C'mon, Alenko! I'd just done about seventy hours of mission time without any sleep, running on med assists half the time; managed to avoid the mission's postmortem thanks to Anderson going bull-in-a-china-shop on procedure and massrelaying me from Arcturus to Luna via very fast picket… I get here with my armor, weapons, little else, the ship on prep for a simulated Condition Alert Seven Twenty and you all looking like being about to have a coronary; Anderson tells me the Alliance and the Hierarchy have brought shakedown day forward one whole month with nearly no notice time to speak of, there goes my hands-on training period thank you very much, so congratulations, buckle up son, crunch time, et cetera; oh, and got Mr. Nihlus McSpectre aboard supervising us, just don't mind him too much, of course there is no ulterior motive, why would you ask? Well, I needed to pod hard, if I was to show up passably competent the morning after, and I had to eat something if I wanted not to look like a ragdoll, so I grabbed and fast-chewed a couple of those, did the infamous Commander Shepard's Sleep Pod Striptease, and hit the sack."

Contrary to his expectations, Alenko didn't even hinted at the possibility of a smirk. Meanwhile, Williams' was too dangerous for words. Not directed at him, though.

"And here he is, alive and kicking. You fat bastards lied to me, LT—" Williams blurted, career-suicidal.

"I said _no_, we didn't lie. Check his medical history, check his—oh, just…" Alenko activated his omni-tool, typed a long query and floated a small listing of documents, which he threw at her by brusquely flexing his arm and raising his wrist over his shoulder, missing her nose by a hairsbreadth, and her murderous eyes by not caring one iota, his own locked on Shepard's. "Look at these and kindly zip it for a minute, chief. Got things to explain to the commander."

Williams grabbed, straightened and guided his arm down, rather forcefully, lowering the holos down to a comfortable height, then began to browse the files while Stearn observed her and the data, not quite comfortable with the idea, judging from his frown, crossed arm and rubbing of his chin.

Alenko, stoically tolerating her tugs, managed a far more civil tone. "Commander, those days we had a note pasted on the Autochef console, warning everybody not to eat these. We'd had a close call with Admiral Hackett's entourage already—"

Shepard was pretty sure Alenko was wrong. "I didn't see any when I arrived."

Stearn suddenly grimaced. "I think I know why: the Turian delegates, that morning. Anderson wouldn't have wanted to risk them noticing it…"

Dismayed, deflated, Alenko finally broke eye contact.

"And you had to arrive that very same day," he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. eyes tightly closed. "And you had to choose precisely those…"

"Well, you know, having just gotten back alive from a stupidly difficult mission, finally getting to join Anderson aboard the Normandy after nearly a year of anticipation, the whole XO thing…" Shepard forced out a cocky smile. "I was feeling lucky."

"You don't believe in luck."

Alenko's half-grin wasn't his congenial one, at all, and Shepard positively knew that his staff lieutenant hadn't been joking one single second. Because that was the closest thing to full-on bitterness he had ever seen him demonstrate, hinting at the remains of their debate. It took him aback a little.

Since that conversation they had a week and a half ago, after the Alliance bomb thing on Agebinium, the man had felt like sort of off-balance. Shepard suspected that all this, these biotic antics, they were a direct consequence somehow.

"Kaidan, I don't believe in _bad_ luck."

The mellow in his own reply surprised him. For all the half-mock hardass impression he was so fond to project, he couldn't help it: he always felt a bit like a big brother when Alenko was around, all the sillier taking into account that the guy was four years or so older than him.

The lieutenant sighed and gave up, rubbing his forehead as if fatigued, which quite probably he was. "Yeah, well then. You are alive, after all, so… For all we know, chances are those things protected you against the Prothean artifact."

_Hunh…?_ What a silly idea… he hoped. Alenko didn't seem to catch his reaction, suddenly too anxious about some last second realization.

"Oh, damn, did you—? Please Sir tell me you haven't eaten any more of those since—"

"Calm down, lieutenant. Of course I didn't: they tasted like dessicated elcor shit anyway, so I tried other flavors, then I found turrón and banana and I was sold."

Alenko seemed to relax, nodding, then frowned, sort of aghast, his lips vocalizing an inaudible 'Banana? Really?'. Shepard shrugged.

"What's 'medi-foam'? Never heard of it," asked Williams, out of the blue, pointing at some line in the report glowing above his arm.

"Just what it sounds like: Chakwas stuffed Lance's digestive apparatus with that, trying to block and neutralize the necrotizing agent while we raced to Gagarin." Alenko hardly turned his head toward her, thoughts still lost in the nine circles of banana-flavored protein hell. Shepard was about to clarify that, while nominally banana, it tasted more like a better coconut than… ah… nominal coconut, but his attention was instantly stolen: by the pictures that Williams was now flicking in and out of the holopane, all of them a one man's carnage show. Stearn's. What had been Alenko's word?

"'Necrotizing'…" he repeated. Alenko nodded.

"Yes. The… uh… 'luckies', they do that, sometimes."

"There are some clips here," Williams observed, to the lieutenant's alarm.

"No, don't open those—!" Alenko shouted, all too late.

The howling was absolutely bloodcurdling. The omni-tool nearfieldcasted the audio to their ear implants, synced to the video showing an overhead view of sickbay: Alenko, Anderson, Boudiaf and Lowe trying to restrain Stearn on a biobed, while Chakwas and someone else ran around quickly grabbing equipment and piling it beside the service chief. There was faint smoke spewing from his bloodstained mouth and nose as he screamed at the top of his lungs.

Shepard couldn't help watch Stearn, who had turned his back at them for a few seconds, embarrassed, perhaps irritated by the exposure. Williams released Alenko's arm, as if burning, her hands raised, teeth bared, apprehensive. Quickly, the lieutenant switched his 'tool off, then put his hands on his hips, eyes downcast and pained.

They recovered, slowly, faces grim.

"Chief, may I…?" Alenko asked. Stearn nodded his consent, and the lieutenant acknowledged that with a nod of his own.

"Okay. It went like this: a minute or so after the chief ingested the bar, he began to show a painful reaction. First in the mouth and mostly in the esophagus, a mildly strong one. The bar's components dispersed in the stomach, gastric acid making them fully active, and began frying its inner layers, not so much a chemical reaction but a micromechanical one, things injecting payloads into cells, little molecular turbine-like engines that attached to the lysosomes and… well, it's complicated. They affected the intestine, too. Seeing that neither her own micromachine remoter tools nor the medi-foam were slowing it down fast enough, Doctor Chakwas put the chief inside her emergency cryopod. Joker hit the top of the envelope and I think we actually broke some FTL record while getting from our side of the Kuiper to Gagarin. When we arrived there, their teams had already received a brute force decompile of the thing's workings, thank God we'd been maneuvering near a buoy and had managed to send a fairly good scan to Alliance Medical. Despite that, they had to extirpate whole chunks of charred tissue from his digestive apparatus, that unsalvageable. Some pulmonary cleaning, too, bits gone the wrong direction, but that was relatively minor stuff."

Alenko frowned, realising how blasé that had felt, and addressed Stearn. "Sorry, didn't mean—"

"It's okay, Sir."

"Thank you, chief. Long story short: he was fitted into an ICU-transfer lifesupport unit and fast-couriered to Earth. There he received proper care: full exploration and clean-up, printing and implanting replacement tissue layers, jumpstarting them, nursing him back to health, and, above all, seeing that he wouldn't lose the…opportunity to serve under your command." And with that, he crossed his arms, rather confrontational.

Shepard let the lieutenant's caustic ending slide: Alenko could beat that dead horse as much as he wanted, but… No matter how sorry he was for the way it was burdening the lieutenant, he wasn't going to further justify himself. And, frankly, it came as a little ungrateful, now that he was doing his bit to keep their men distracted.

Then he realized that Williams was looking at him rather critically. Of course: now they were her men, too, and she wasn't one to let them down. Surely the only thing keeping her from joining the lieutenant and gang up on him was her naval newbie's caution—_Ha!_—and… well…

Meanwhile, Stearn had the good grace to keep his expression quite neutral. Shepard felt a pang of conscience. He vaguely liked the guy, had seen his somewhat interesting record, what he was on track for. But, honestly, the service chief lacked that spark, that uniqueness that would have brought him to his attention, to his ground teams. Also, as much as he empathized with the chief—he'd had enough intimate acquaintance with flesh-eating nasties, thank you—this whole snack of doom thing was spectacularly silly.

_Heh, look at all this sullenness… _He'd better redirect the conversation a little.

"Okay, look: someone must have fixed the stupid machine since that, you know, I chasing Geth with you guys instead of terrorizing all the pretty nurses at Arcturus Hospital," and Shepard laughed at Williams' rolling eyes: her naughty skepticism was priceless. "Don't look at me that way, chief. Every few missions we En-Sevens fubar hard, and it's the clean white sheets treatment, receiving the kind attentions of the young nubile Chakwases-in-training and the odd cultured tissue grafting or two."

"Frankenskipper in love," She said, with a mischievous glimmer in her eyes, while Alenko's was a humorless suffering snort.

Progress. The chief merited his best fake consternation. "I've got feelings and stuff, too, you know…"

"Of course you do. 'Young nubile', hunh?" Williams tut-tutted. "See, Lance? Deep inside, the Commander's a romantic, too," she said, air-quoting the term. "You ought to compare notes."

"Don't know, Ma'am. I'm more of a second hand classic pop-rom literature academic. He'd need a better match…"

The chiefs interchanged not really that credibly thoughtful looks, then glanced at Alenko, assessing him. The lieutenant, still focused on Shepard, seemed to feel the attention—biotic telepathy at work, surely—and hesitantly turned his head toward the pair, suspicious. Stearn quickly began to examine his fingernails with supreme attention and badly hidden amusement, while Williams held his gaze with her own self-satisfied one, unflinchingly. After a few wary seconds, he disregarded her.

"Well?" Shepard insisted.

Alenko considered the question for a couple of seconds, then seemed to do the effort to lighten up his mood, pulling from his reserves the tiny dose of impish left.

"The answer is no, Commander, I won't compare notes."

Even Stearn sniggered a little. Shepard, after a chuckle, matched the silliness with his own.

"It's sooo your loss, Lieutenant."

Satisfied with getting Alenko's muted grin back, he remembered to check on Private Fredricks' progress. The lad had just finished arranging and activating the auto-mats on the floor. Their smartfiber foam, switched from the usual standalone threadmill mode to conjoined passive, had already sealed the seams and inflated. Holomarked and trainer VI-monitored, the set made for a pretty decent martial arts ring. Head protector in place, doing a little warmup dance on the now thickly padded surface, Fredo was chatting with the constantly renewing pack of spectators and passer-bys. Upon noticing his attention, the private threw him a gloved thumbs-up. So time to wrap things here.

"Okay, Lieutenant: that thing, those 'luckies', what I meant to say, they ought to be edible these days."

Alenko shook his head. "I'm afraid it doesn't work that way, commander."

"And how does it work?" That was Williams, firmly back into her arrogant cheerfulness, which Alenko seemed to resent in some measure, given that sarcastic tinge in his voice.

"Oh, so now you are interested, aren't you, chief?"

"Don't be mean, LT. You've managed to convince me. Big win, isn't it?"

Alenko paused his eyes on her, then suddenly composed his face into his most genial countenance ever. _Uh-oh._

"A big win, Williams, would have been you shutting up your precious mouth for a single minute at the beginning of this fine mess and letting me explain things first time I tried instead of driving us bonkers."

So they were about to start the madness over. Shepard _really _wanted to wrap things up. Williams wouldn't yield, though. "Hey, LT, no need to be that—"

_Aw, quiet everyone!_

"Williams, be good and… ah, shut up your _precious_ mouth; Stearn, keep on smiling, it suits you; Alenko, chill out and explain."

Sultry in jest-smile; blissful smile; thin-lipped smile. He really ought to take holos, post them in the Fleet's NetChan, with the other ships' candids and blooper reels—ought to secure clearance first, but it should make the PR guys happy. He watched Alenko relax into something closer to his usual warmer self, bow to him and start his tale.

"Yes, Sir. The theory behind our Autochef was…" then he furrowed his brow a little, turning his head in thought. "Ah, how to describe it best…?"

"Inmates, asylum…" Stearn suggested, and Alenko nodded, grateful.

"Pretty much. Thank you, chief. Okay: once upon a time there was an Alliance Military's Lifesupport Technologies Research and Development Department, completely, utterly out of control…"

* * *

Author's notes:

This delay wasn't intended to happen, although it was oh-so-meant to be, knowing myself. Yeah, entire months have passed since Chapter One, just great. Well, this one was sliced off the unwieldly mass of a second chapter I was to post, so hopefully the next one will arrive faster, once I patch the disparate chunks and putty the seams.

Meanwhile, I'm learning, a lot, about how not to do this, by doing it, ha ha, please don't kill me. It's quite exciting, actually, like a car accident in superslow motion, all those flying parts doing their pretty trajectories and the sexy accordioning and look, a fire and everything!

Damn, this is painful. Again: grammar totalitarians, weapons free! This one surely needs you—I've checked and rechecked, but… I'm easy prey :(

Have fun… hopefully—loads of pretty dubious technobabble, I'm just that difficult. Mmm…


End file.
